The biting stopped, and Roy opened his eyes long enough to make out the shadow of a bear standing on all fours above the helpless girl and tearing at her body.

For more than half a century, grizzly bears roamed free in the national parks without causing a human fatality.  Then in 1967, on a single August night, two separate and unrelated campers, a distance apart, were savagely mangled and killed by enraged bears.

Night of the Grizzlies, Jack Olsen's true account, traces the causes of that tragic night: the rangers' disregard of established safety precautions and persistent warning by seasoned campers that some of the bears were acting "funny," and the comforting belief that the great bears were not really dangerous.  It is a tautly compelling, deeply probing reconstruction of events surrounding the gruesome deaths of Julie Helgeson and Michele Koons.  Even more than that, it is a gripping and moving tragedy of the great grizzly's inexorable extermination at the hands of the deadliest animal of all-the creature called man.